Paleo Retiree writes:
Low-budget Walerian Borowczyk nunsploitation from 1978. It’s verrrrrrrry episodic — the film feels like Borowczyk started shooting without much of a script and winged it. Its shifts back and forth between erotic reverie and satirical blasphemy — both crucifixes and dildos are major decor elements — feel more haphazard than they were probably meant to. And much of the camerawork is, for no apparent reason, as jiggly-cam / handheld as a modern Bourne thriller. Annoying.
But the film also has a lot going for it, including mood, light, decor, and — especially — eroticism and sensual intensity. The tenderness and grossness of flesh, the delirium of sexual feelings, the beastliness of coupling, the torrents of sensation and emotion that sex can release … Borowczyk was a master at portraying (and conveying) all these things. He was also, apparently, a master at convincing actresses to take part in outrageous movies and far-out scenes — how I wish I could have seen him (and his performers) in action on the set. The film’s a peculiar combination of the semi-amateurish and the really stunning. It’s also bursting at the seams with chic and daring Euro-beauties sporting awesomely exuberant ‘70s muffs.
Related
- The film is available as a DVD at both Amazon and Netflix.
- I wrote about another memorable nunsploitation film back at my old blog.
- Nunsploitation has its own Wikipedia entry!
- Here’s a good NYTimes obit of Walerian Borowczyk.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Thanks to your recommendation, I recently listened to Patrick Allitt’s “American Religious History” from the Teaching Company. He mentioned how during the 19th century anti-Catholic fervor ran high and one of the bestsellers of the day was “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed.” The book purported to be an expose of how nuns in convents were sexually exploited by priests. A complete fabrication, it went through multiple printings and sold thousands of copies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Monk
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I’d forgotten about that, tks. Did you get much out of the Allitt? I found it very enjoyable and informative — what a cool perspective to look at American history from. Plus Allitt has such a generous, sweet manner. He’s so organized, and he seems genuinely fond of and amused by his subject matter.
As for nuns and such, it’s a hoot, isn’t it? I often wonder if sex fantasies about what’s going on inside convents started up a mere millisecond after Catholicism itself was invented. Is a Catholicism *without* the accompanying blasphemy and feverish sex fantasies even conceivable? I don’t envy Catholics (R.C.’s) their guilt, their obsessions and their pains, but I do have moments when I envy the intensity of their feelings about evil and sex. It can get a bit monotonous, lord knows. Still: Whew, hot stuff.
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“I often wonder if sex fantasies about what’s going on inside convents started up a mere millisecond after Catholicism itself was invented.”
I think they just recycled the fantasies that must have been rampant about the Vestal Virgins.
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Maybe these fantasies qualify as Human Universals. It’s OK with me if they do.
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Another difference is who the audience is. If they’re from a place with a strong tradition of Carnival, the nunsploitation thing looks like part of their broader pattern of *occasionally* lowering-the-high and elevating-the-low, in order to release pressure from the social system, and to keep a more egalitarian social ethic. That would be in Spain, Italy, and southern/western Germany, Switzerland, Austria.
Then you have places where Carnival is not a big deal, where pressure rarely gets released, and people are more brooding and internal. There, it looks more like their general pattern of enduring lurid fascinations. Most of the Catholic / formerly Catholic Slavs, and the Japanese.
This is another example of how different people are on either side of the civilizational fault-line that cuts through Europe, separating the hilly/mountainous region from the lowland plains region. Settled hardscrabble farmers are more brooding and develop lurid perversions, whether or not they act on them (often not, with pent-up perversion feeding into itself). Rowdier, footloose herder folk let off steam more frequently, so it doesn’t reach over-boiling levels.
Farmers are also more deferential, even worshipful, toward authority and hierarchy, whereas pastoralists have more of a “don’t tread on me” stance. It’s not rejecting all authority — just keeping them in their place, so they don’t get too big for their breeches and abuse their authority, and also so that they don’t become corrupted by more and more power. It’s for the good of the authority figure’s own character to get occasionally roasted by the rabble.
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Why would priests sexually exploit nuns? Aren’t they into boys and each other?
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The 19th century was a simpler time.
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